Matt Schley
July 10, 2023 
Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window, the anime film that adapts the memoir by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, just released some new info, including a trailer and a release date.
The film hits Japanese screens December 8.
It’ll star 7-year-old Liliana Ohno as Totto-chan. You can hear a bit of her performance in the new trailer. The trailer also features Kuroyanagi as herself looking back on her life.
The memoir details Kuroyanagi’s years at Tomoe Gakuen, a unique elementary school to which she transferred after not fitting in at her original school. It also deals with Japan during the second World War. It was first published in 1981, and has been read by generations of Japanese children.
Kuroyanagi was born in 1933, entered the entertainment industry in 1953, and is perhaps best known as the host of the series Tetsuko’s Room, which has been on the air since 1976.
Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window is directed by Shinnosuke Yakuwa, who’s helmed a bunch of recent Doraemon films, at Shin-Ei Animation.
Here’s the description of the English-language version of the book, which was translated by Dorothy Britton:
This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an ideal school in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom, and love. This unusual school had old railroad cars for classrooms, and it was run by an extraordinary man-its founder and headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi–who was a firm believer in freedom of expression and activity.
Source: ANN
